Saturday, 14 February 2015

North Carolina triple murderer Craig
Stephen Hicks' first wife says he was obsessed with the 1993 Joel
Schumacher film Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas as William "D-Fens" Foster, an angry white man on a maniacal sociopathic rampage.

The dark white-world wish-fulfillment fantasy in this popular Hollywood
film was designed to tap a generalized social antagonism toward
"reverse discrimination" and multiculturalism in the 1990s. The film
valorizes the frustrations and anger of the isolated "liberal"
individualist, an engineer who's been put out of work in the nuclear
defence industry, has marital difficulties and shows little patience
with the traffic problems which crop up on LA freeways (of all places!);
the film charts this new-age American hero's erratic,
credibility-stretching reassertion of white privilege in a series of
increasingly
destructive stupid-macho acts, beginning with a more or less random
assault upon a Korean shopowner, who has the audacity to charge him all
of 85 cents for a can of Coca-Cola, while looking and acting
extremely... "Korean".

Tasha Robinson, a critic reviewing the film for the site The A.V. Club, wrote:

"It's seemingly meant as a sort of dark comedy about the petty
annoyances of life, and how they can accumulate and become so maddening
that over-the-top cathartic violence seems like the only satisfying
option. But Douglas' violent reaction to his surroundings, and the
way the film treats virtually everyone around him as worthless, and
presents his violence as the comedic payoff, turns it into a tone-deaf,
self-pitying lament about the terrible persecution facing the oppressed
majority in an era of political correctness and increasing
multiculturalism. In its ugly, skewed world, almost everyone but this
madman is dumb, incompetent, and offensive, and his only possible
solution is to wipe a few of these losers off the face of the earth,
then die. It's a profoundly hateful film disguised alternately (and erratically) as either tragedy or humor."

Did
Craig Hicks see himself as the irascible, wronged and legitimately
aggrieved American lone-wolf hero played by the Hollywood actor?

"A woman who lives
near the scene described Hicks as short-tempered. 'Anytime that I saw
him or saw interaction with him or friends or anyone in the parking lot
or myself, he was angry,' Samantha Maness said of Hicks. 'He was very
angry, anytime I saw him.'

"Hicks'
ex-wife, Cynthia Hurley, said that before they divorced about 17 years
ago, his favorite movie was 'Falling Down,' the 1993 Michael Douglas
film about a divorced unemployed engineer who goes on a shooting
rampage.

"'That always freaked
me out," Hurley said. 'He watched it incessantly. He thought it was
hilarious. He had no compassion at all,' she said."

It
is clear from his Facebook page that Hicks, viewing the world from within his private fantasy bubble, considered religion a
problem in general as well as a personal nemesis. The page includes no
mention of parking issues. It does however contain strong hints as to
Hicks' private conception of a remedy for the larger issues concerning
him.

"Frequent posts about atheism and featuring
anti-religion views appeared on a Facebook page in Hicks’ name, with a
recent post reading: 'People say nothing can
solve the Middle East problem, not mediation, not arms, not financial
aid. I say there is something. Atheism.' One post also featured a
photograph of a revolver on a scale bearing the caption: 'Yes, that is 1
pound 5.1 ounces for my loaded 38 revolver, its holster, and five extra
rounds in a speedloader.' According to the page, Hicks studied as a
paralegal at Durham Technical Community College in Durham, North
Carolina, and was a supporter of 'Atheists for Equality.'"

-- IB Times, 11 February 2015

Saw a man walking down the middle of road between two lanes of traffic, smart suit, no coat. #DFens #fallingdown: image via Adam Moran @AdamMoran, 14 February 2013

Joel Schumacher, who directed Falling Down, had
been regularly aiming his films at specific target audiences; most
commonly, in his string of box-office successes immediately preceding Falling Down (Flatliners, The Lost Boys, St Elmo's Fire),
at "generational" audiences composed largely of males in their late
teens and twenties. He called "working with adults" a defining aspect of
his moving on to do Falling Down. "I felt that there was a
critical
mass building in culture of anger and rage," he told interviewer Chris
Robergé of Tech after the film's 1993 release. "In the last 12 years it
was
swept under the carpet while all of the problems kept getting worse and
worse. Unlike in the 60s when most creative people were expressing their
feelings, outside of African-American filmmakers and rappers and street
art, I didn't see much going on. I wanted to be in people's faces about
what was going on. In some ways I think that it's worse now than when we
started making the film. Local news seems to be filled with these types
of crimes. This sort of
crime is on the rise in the country. Just last week there were two in
D.C.
and one in Memphis. I tried to put a face and a soul to these six
o'clock
news stories. This is the guy whose neighbors you see saying, `I don't
understand. He was very nice.' "

Even very nice guys have bad traffic days, right?

You know its people like this clown that make me feel like Michael Douglas in #Fallingdown: image via Edward Browne Adam Moran @ER_Brwone, 20 January 2015

But
it seems the
real-life individual upon whom Schumacher based the Michael Douglas /
"D-Fens"
character was viewed in a somewhat different light by those
who had actually known him: his mother and ex-wife, for example, suggested he had been not quite so "nice", perhaps, as
the director would have it. "Both
of them,"
reported Tech, "thought that he was a somewhat frightening
man with a propensity towards violence even before he begins his tragic
trek across Los Angeles. Still, Schumacher insists, "'I thought that he has
an Everyman quality. I didn't want him to be a lunatic.'"

Everyman good. Many butts in seats.

A
similar confusion of fact and intent haunts the film, which attempts repeatedly to
elicit a sort of sick sympathy for this character -- whose bad day starts,
not with an exacerbated parking dispute, yet parked and exacerbated all
the same, in a freeway traffic jam. Honk! Then later, logically
enough... apocalyptic American Terrorist mayhem. When a pissed off
nuclear engineer blows his wig, common sense and civilization watch out!
It's like in the game of Risk: the best defense is a vigilant,
aggressive offense.

Falling Down
is tugged to and fro by more jagged reversals of sympathetic
identification than perhaps any other film in cinematic history. The cause of
the movie's deep confusion? Simple enough, to hear its creator tell it:
this is Hollywood, not
reality. "First and foremost, I have to make some sort of
entertainment. I don't
like movies that are soapboxes. I felt that the movie was a good story
with
a western type formula... I feel that [the enraged protagonist] acts
out a fantasy behavior. I think that
audiences will be hard pressed not to identify with him. I think that
people are conflicted. That's the purpose of the film. I think that it
would be nice to do this, but we can't... I think we are a violent
culture and there's a thin line between
what's considered acceptable violence and what's considered unacceptable
violence."

Fancy a 60 mile traffic jam that lasted 11 days?.... I'd have done a Michael Douglas in that #Fallingdown: image via James @Islandsnapper, 21 January 2015

Falling Down
tries to have it both ways, wobbles back and forth across that thin
line, now proposing itself as a serious drama about the plight of the
ordinary decent hardworking average Joe turned righteous avenger, now as broad comedy portraying, with tongue no more than half in cheek, a
cartoon psychokiller taking out his moment-to-moment rages on a series
of predictable racial stereotypes (which is evidently the way Craig
Hicks also envisions the game, though of course Craig's not Michael Douglas, he's a real player, and he's all too dead serious).

To
employ two of its old reliable clichés, Hollywood has been having its
cake and eating it too while getting away with murder for a good while
now.

The Douglas character in Falling Down doesn't waste any time doing depth analytics on the sociology of the neighbourhoods he invades. Exactly
how much Hicks might have known about his young Chapel Hill victims is unclear. Did he
know that Deah Barakat was a Syrian-American of Palestinian origin, who
along with other UNC dentistry students was actively involved in
arranging a humanitarian mission to Turkey, to treat Syrian refugees as
part of a project organized by UNC-Chapel Hill School of Dentistry and
the Syrian-American Medical Society? Did he know that Yusor and Razan
Abu-Salha were terrific students, lovely generous happy talented young women, and Palestinian-Americans? Did
he know how these young people spent their time, when they were
together in the condominium with friends? Did Craig Hicks suspect they were up to
something sinister -- mapping out a cunning parking plot, say? Or
scheming up frightening new ways of providing free dental care to the
indigent?

There can be no question
as to whether the killer understood that these people were devout Muslims; that much he
would have had to immediately recognize, every time he appeared, armed and angry, at
their door, which was decorated with a prayer in Arabic -- the sort of tense encounter which,
according to witnesses, occurred every month or so.

But it seems as though Craig Hicks wasn't one to care much about prayer, in any form.

"He hates us for what we are," one of the #ChapelHillShooting victims had said of the shooter: image via Yousef Saleh @fouseyTUBE 12 February 2015

"Imad Ahmad, who lived in the condo
where his friends were killed until Barakat and Yusor Abu-Salha were
married in December, said Hicks complained about once a month that the
two men were parking in a visitor's space as well as their assigned
spot.

"'He would come over to the door. Knock on the door and then
have a gun on his hip saying 'you guys need to not park here,' said
Ahmad, a graduate student in chemistry at UNC-Chapel Hill. 'He did it
again after they got married.'

"Both
Hicks and his neighbors
complained to the property managers, who apparently didn't intervene.
'They told us to call the police if the guy came and harassed us again,'
Ahmad said."

-- IB Times, 11 February 2015

@ MarkArum This mornings commute was like the movie #fallingdown wiyj #MichaelDouglas I wanted to go on a rager.: image via Average Joe @Thompsonetti, 22 January 2015

On
the occasion of the murders, Hicks may have been surprised. There were
some differences
to be seen in the target environment. Deah Barakat and Yusor Abu-Salha
were now married (they'd wed in late December, just six weeks before).
Yusor's younger sister Hazan was visiting,
evidently using one of the designated visitors' parking spaces outside
the
condominium. There is some question as to whether Hicks may have
regarded these spaces as his own.

"Police have not said how Hicks
got inside the condominium, but on Wednesday afternoon there were no
visible signs of damage to the door, which was affixed with orange
stickers warning of biohazardous material inside. A wooden placard
bearing Arabic script that translates to 'Thanks to God' hung over their
doorbell."

Had
Craig Hicks perhaps also seen the film American Sniper -- another,
more recent popular fantasy vehicle featuring American Terror (the
export version) and vigilante-style Muslim-stalking spiked with
execution-from-a-distance -- and empathized with
its murderous hero's summary method of dealing with Muslims?

This
much is certain: if Craig Hicks made his bright young Muslim neighbours
nervous, they had cause to be fearful; perhaps greater cause than they,
even in their darkest private moments of secret distrust of the
American Dream, could have guessed -- committed optimists though they seemingly all were, can they never have had a single such doubtful moment, looking as they looked, being what they were?

By looking the way they looked, and being what they were, and living so near to him, they were playing a mortal game of risk.

"Search
warrants show the suspect in the shooting deaths of three Muslim
college students in North Carolina had an arsenal of a dozen firearms in
the home he shared with his wife, along with a large stash of
ammunition.

"Records filed in Durham County superior court on Friday list items
recovered by police from the Chapel Hill condominium of Craig Stephen
Hicks, the 46-year-old charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
The warrants show that three handguns were recovered from the Hicks
home, in addition to a pistol the suspect had with him when arrested.
Also listed are two shotguns and seven rifles, including a
military-style AR-15 carbine. Police also recovered numerous loaded
magazines and cases of ammunition. Eight spent shell-casings were found
in the neighboring apartment of the young couple killed."

-- The Guardian, 13 February 2015

Rational people stayed out of this fellow's way, maybe quaked a bit
inwardly when unfortunate enough to be in his presence, for
when the bleak, chill winds of American Terror blow, the little leaves
clatter meekly
in the campus condo parking lots, as before an enchanter fleeing.

But
the risk game's not quite over. Let us return across the rank, bitter
field of ashes and aloes beneath which the soul of this country now lies
buried, to consider again the grim, compulsive power of its media
images: had
the killer, like so many other frustrated and enraged white men
with free-floating persecution complexes, counting over the hated names, fondling the beautiful weapons in the neatly kept gun lockers, been affected by, even, perhaps, derived
some deranged sense of empowerment from the most recent wave of
Islamophobia in America incited by publicity surrounding the atrocities of Islamic State?

"Leaders
from UNC, N.C. State, Duke and North Carolina Central University spoke
at a news conference Wednesday evening on the UNC campus and stressed
that it was too soon to know whether the students were victims of a hate
crime.

"Imam Abdullah Antepli, a Duke University Islamic leader,
said he had 'full trust' that law enforcement officials would determine
the killer’s motives. But asked if tensions had been higher recently, he
said, 'Absolutely.'

“'This incident immediately revealed the
vulnerability of the Muslim community and the image and reputation of
Islam as a religion and Muslims as people in American society at large,'
he said. 'There are several hundred Muslim families in the greater
Chapel Hill area, including myself, and we didn’t send our children to
school today. We wanted to know what was going on.'

"It
was logical for some people to hear about the shootings and wonder if
recent news involving the Islamic State -- including the deaths of a
Jordanian pilot and an American hostage –- could lead to some sort of
reprisal against Muslims, said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law
Center.

“'I
think it’s perfectly natural to guess that this is anti-Islamic,' Potok
said in a telephone interview Wednesday. 'Not just because the three
victims are Muslim, but because there has been so much terrible news in
recent days about extremist Muslims.'”